If you own a business or are responsible for any kind of marketing efforts, chances are that you have developed an interest in LinkedIn, Facebook and a handful of other social media websites.Each of these has its own share of success stories, with certain businesses blooming as a result of their smart social media campaign.​Although these web services offer a great deal to the savvy businesses, it isn't always easy to figure out how to reap these rewards on your own...

This leaves many people asking themselves: “Which one of these social networks should I focus my energy on?”

The Illusion of Exclusivity

The first important thing for any business representative on social media to understand is that none of these choices are exclusive. Although some businesses have millions of Twitter followers and others get the most action on Facebook, these differences are only surface-level phenomena.

The fact is that your brand needs to be equally active on these social media networks, while keeping carefully in mind the differences between them and the audiences they represent. LinkedIn has a very different audience than Facebook, for instance, and in order to truly benefit from either it is necessary to capitalize on both.

Understanding the Difference in Audience

LinkedIn, being a web service designed for professionals, has a different approach to information and to content; much different than any other social network. Even though it is a social media networking site that, on paper, is not unlike Facebook, in practice, it serves different goals and uses different approaches to attain them.

There are certain benefits to LinkedIn that you can never effectively realize with Facebook or Twitter. These include connecting with potential business partners in an environment that encourages working together to achieve the common goal of success.

Facebook, on the other hand, is a fantastic platform for connecting with consumers and sharing information about your brand on a wide scale. This lets you build your visibility and create a more successful company image. However, very few professionals would look to Facebook for candidates to fill in a vacant position or for potential business partners.

Synchronizing Your Social Media Strategy

It can be helpful to think of LinkedIn as an application that can be used to meet specific goals, and of Facebook as a platform for sharing, communicating, and building other applications on top of. In order to see your business become the runaway smash hit success that you surely want it to be, it is necessary to synchronize the benefits of both in a targeted manner.

That means using LinkedIn to network with business connections, such as suppliers, distributors, potential employees or clients, and using Facebook to maximize your brand visibility and awareness.

If you create enough hyper-sharable content on Facebook, your LinkedIn activity will rise as a result, even though the web service itself has very little support for viral content sharing.